The Pub Curmudgeon

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the appalling decision in Northern Ireland to introduce vaccine passports for hospitality venues . At ...

The other day in Tesco, I spotted ten-packs of canned Draught Guinness that were being sold with two cans of the alcohol-free version includ...

Last week, Mark Johnson published a thought-provoking blogpost about how the language people use to talk about drinking can have an adverse...

The hospitality industry in Northern Ireland will have been dismayed by yesterday’s news that the province’s ministers had decided to introd...

Four weeks after our exploration of Stockport , our latest Proper Day Out took us to the former silk town of Macclesfield, just a 12-mile tr...

During the lockdown, Holt’s brewery bought and refurbished the Lower Turk’s Head on Shudehill in Manchester city centre, and reopened it in ...

In his budget earlier this week, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced the most comprehensive review of alcohol duties for many years, and indeed...

On our recent day out in Stockport, someone commented that they weren’t too enamoured of the recent grey makeover applied to the Swan With T...

We pick up our day out in Stockport having just left the Railway and heading back past the Arden Arms to the second Sam Smith’s pub of the ...

On Friday 6 March 2020 we had a very enjoyable day out in Burton-on-Trent . On the platform of Sheffield station I spotted a Chinese student...

Last week, it was widely reported that 2021 had seen a 40% decline in sales of cask beer compared with the last pre-lockdown year of 2019, ...